Design and Art Australia Online

painter, illustrator, writer and teacher, was one of the ten children of Benjamin Walker Lacy, a banker of Belgrave Square, London, and his wife Elizabeth. Nothing is known of his early life or training but in 1842, 'wearied with the hollow conventionalities and grinning hypocrisies of a highly refined community, flat, stale and unprofitable as everything appeared, and possessed with an uncontrollable desire to see men and nature in their primitive state, [Lacy] bade adieu to Old England and sailed for the Antipodes’. He disembarked at Sydney on 6 July 1842 from the barque Wilmot and soon fell into bad company, being, as he later recalled, 'tolerably well fleeced’.

After this experience Lacy went by sea to the Hunter River and spent 'some eight to ten months shooting, stuffing strange birds and reptiles, and preserving insects’. He next tried to cross the Blue Mountains, then eventually moved down the coast and inland to various centres in New South Wales. He is undoubtedly the artist identified only as 'G.L. of Wollongong’ who contributed ten works to the second Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia Exhibition held at Sydney in 1849. Titles included Kangaroo Hunt, the Chase , Kangaroo Hunt, the Death and A Corroberry [sic], or Aboriginal Dance , as well as Head, after Rembrandt and Achilles and Lycaon . All were offered for sale.

The two copies are likely to have been brought to Australia with him and suggest some art school training in England, while two naive watercolours of the London ballerinas Duvernay and Taglione dated 1833 (sold from a family collection in 1974: now Australian Ballet Archives), despite indicating an early interest in drawing and some artistic talent, are evidence that any such formal training must have occurred after this date. A highly stylised drawing of an Aboriginal woman and its pair Coo-ee (an Aboriginal man on a peak), from the same family collection, are said to be the first paintings sent back to Lacy’s family in London. (A variant on the latter appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News on 15 September 1866.)

A self-confessed adventurer, Lacy next appears on the goldfields in the central west of New South Wales, being known to have visited Ophir, Tambaroora and Sofala during the early 1850s. Lacy’s output included many humorous observations on the local mining community and on government attempts to regulate their activities, Ophir – Diggers Bolting , Tambaroura [sic]. Commissioner Settling a Dispute (both Dixson Galleries) and Commissioners’ Barracks at Sofala (National Library of Australia [NLA]), for example. He moved on to the Victorian goldfields about 1855 and remained there for at least five years. Highly prolific throughout this period, Lacy’s illustrations were possibly marketed through storekeepers on the diggings or in nearby towns. The reappearance in March 1970 of twenty-five of his watercolours at Joel’s auction rooms, offered by the great-grandson of the early Bendigo bookseller William Casey, adds some weight to this hypothesis.

During his Victorian years Lacy continued to record aspects of mining life, but he also painted such topical subjects as The First Gathering of the Bendigo Caledonian Society (1860, NLA), The Bendigo-Castlemaine Coach and Burke and Wills Expedition at the Campaspe, near Barnedown (1860, NLA). Other works from this time include equestrian and hunting scenes, bushrangers and Aboriginal subjects.

In 1860 Lacy’s reminiscences were published as four articles in the Albury (NSW) Southern Courier , again initialled 'G.L.’. One reveals that he briefly returned to London in about 1858 59. It also provides information about his artistic activities, thirst for adventure (of any kind) and obvious skill as a bushman: 'I had been invited by a friend to accompany him about 300 miles down one of our main rivers … As he was interested to get a few sketches characteristic of wild horse hunting, and feeling interested myself in participating in the forthcoming fun (for, as he curtly remarked, they would kill a man or two if I wished to see anything particularly exciting), I took advantage of the opportunity, and being furnished with a good hack, arrived in due time at the head station at Wodonga. I stayed about a month at the station, made a good many sketches, and having seen enough, started alone on my long journey homewards’.

Lacy subsequently lived in the Braidwood district of New South Wales, being employed between 1868 and 1877 as a schoolteacher at Farringdon, Jellat Jellat and other local settlements according to Moore’s Almanacs . An undated, probably earlier, letter to his sister, written on the verso of a sketch held by the National Library (Nan Kivell Collection 9862), mentions that he was also 'a teacher at Bong Bong’. Between 1865 and 1878, from Braidwood, he contributed a number of drawings to the Illustrated Sydney News , including a particularly gruesome kangaroo hunt, a view of the Araluen goldfields, and scenes of Aboriginal and European bush life. Customs of Aboriginals in New South Wales. Punishment was published as a chromolithographic supplement to the Illustrated Sydney News in May 1874. His signed watercolour and ink Death of an Explorer (Queensland Art Gallery [QAG]) appeared as a full-page black and white illustration renamed Lost in the Bush in the Illustrated Sydney News of 16 October 1865 and, a week later, in the Illustrated Melbourne Post . He also drew for Sydney Punch , a cartoon on the time-honoured subject of incompetent women drivers by 'G.L.’ appearing in the issue of 29 May 1873. A lively watercolour caricature of a corroboree (QAG) also seems to have been intended for an illustration.

Lacy resigned from his last post at Warragubra in mid 1876 and moved to Bathurst. The following year the five watercolour pictures he showed with the Agricultural Society of New South Wales were commended. He died in Bathurst Hospital of heart disease on 10 August 1878, aged sixty, and was buried in the Church of England section of the local cemetery. Nothing is known about his family, apart from the fact that a nephew of the same name contributed political articles to the Bulletin and other Sydney journals in the 1890s.

All Lacy’s surviving works are in watercolour, wash and ink or, occasionally, pencil. A lithograph published by Richardson & Leech of Sydney is also known. Some are signed 'G. Lacy’ or 'G.L.’ but few are dated and thus cannot be assigned with any certainty to his New South Wales or Victorian years. However, the artist’s style is quite distinctive and the humorous inscriptions, often several lines in length, which usually accompany the image provide further clues to location.

Lacy was certainly a capable topographical artist: his View of the Araluen Goldfields reproduced in the Illustrated Sydney News of 16 July 1866 is very striking. But he particularly excelled in depicting action scenes and conflict between authority and the underdog, epitomised in the frequently reproduced wash drawing Go it, Frying Pan. Head Him down the Flat!!! (Mitchell Library [ML]: NLA). He also drew humorous sequential sketches (strip cartoons) such as The New Chum (18 drawings), The Jolly Digger (18), The Jolly Digger Buys a Horse (12) and The Matrimonial Thermometer (14). His extraordinary watercolour A Dream. The Effects of Lobster-Salad, the Morning after the Ball (ML), one of the few erotic images known from the colonial era, shows a woman en d é shabill é lying on a bed in a pose reminiscent of Fuseli’s Nightmare and dreaming of herself and her suitor as skeletons, the dream incorporating a joke about the current fashion for enormous crinoline frames (c.1860). It too is titled as if for engraving.

As a skilled and amused observer of social foibles and appearances Lacy may be compared with his contemporary S.T. Gill , except that Lacy was almost exclusively interested in incident and showed little talent for landscape, tending to sketch in his backgrounds with broad, sweeping strokes. He remained an obscure figure for many years and was not represented in any Australian public art collection until 1970. The National Library, with over twenty original works, has the most comprehensive holding.

Writers:

Callow, M. W.
McDonald, Patricia R.

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989